Yeager rides 'Glamorous Glennis' into record books

The man who broke the sound barrier was West Virginia bred, in a town "just about as far from worldwide acclaim as anyplace that's barely a dot on the map," the website chuckyeager.com said. On Feb. 13, 1923, Albert Hal and Susie Mae Yeager's "second son," Chuck, was born in Myra, "just a few miles up the Mud River from Hamlin."

The website said "when he wasn't climbing trees or exploring in the woods, he could often be found by Grandpa Yeager's side watching, listening and learning how to become a skillful hunter and fisherman."

He was 24 in 1947, an Air Force captain nursing broken ribs, when he broke Mach 1 in an X-1. Others had tried and died. He'd been 18 when he "enlisted in the Army Air Corps." Subsequently, while "serving as crew chief on an AT-11 É he was selected for pilot training under the flying sergeant program in July 1942." The initial "queasiness" he experienced "the first couple of times he went up" didn't deter him, and at 20 he earned his wings.

During World War II, Yeager, flying a P-51B, downed a German "Me 109 before being shot down on his eighth combat mission." The French underground helped him "evade capture," chuckyeager.com documented. He then appealed, "all the way up the chain to Supreme Allied Commander Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower," to be allowed to return to flight status. Before long, he was back in the cockpit, this time in a P-51C and -D.

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"He combined (20/10) vision with cunning, concentration, relentless ferocity and superb piloting skills to rack up a final total of 12.5 aerial victories" over "64 combat missions," chuckyeager.com said.

Postwar, Yeager was assigned to Wright Field, Ohio. "Since it was his job to check out all aircraft coming out of maintenance, he got to fly almost every fighter on the flight line. He demonstrated such exceptional skill that he was selected to fly in air shows and, in September 1945, he made his first trip to Muroc Army Air Field (now Edwards Air Force Base), where he flew accelerated service trials on the new P-80A Shooting Star, America's first operational jet fighter."

Before he broke Mach 1, Yeager made "three glide flights in the Bell XS-1 rocket research plane." On the "first powered flight" (Aug. 29, 1947), the website said he achieved .85 Mach, "encounter(ing) severe buffeting and sudden nose-up and -down trim changes during his next six flights."

On Oct. 10, a shockwave caused him to lose "pitch control altogether. É He reached Mach 0.997, but without pitch control it would have been foolhardy to proceed."

One night, after dinner at the local bar, Pancho Barnes' Happy Bottom Riding Club, Yeager and his wife, Glennis, went horseback riding. His mount threw him and he broke two ribs. Fearing he'd be grounded, he saw an off-base doctor, who taped him up; the only other person in whom he confided was his friend, X-1 program flight engineer Jack Ridley. Because the injury would keep Yeager from leaning over to latch his cockpit door, Ridley, using a broomstick handle, devised a way for Yeager to secure the latch.

On Oct. 14, carried to 30,000 feet altitude by a B-29, Yeager slid into the X-1, performed the latching maneuver, and was dropped through the bomb bay doors. The website said he "fired all four chambers of his engine in rapid sequence and bolted away from the launch aircraft.

Accelerating upward, he shut down two chambers and tested the moveable tail as his Machmeter registered numbers of 0.83, .88 and 0.92. Moved in small increments, it provided effective control." At 0.92 "he leveled out at 42,000 feet and relit a third chamber of his engine." At 43,000 feet, the X-1 "needle on his Machmeter jumped off the scale." His final speed was 700 mph, or Mach 1.06.

"There should've been a bump on the road, something to let you know you had just punched a nice clean hole through that sonic barrier," Yeager wrote in "Yeager" (Bantam/1985). "We were flying supersonic! And it was as smooth as a baby's bottom: Grandma could be sitting up there sipping lemonade."

The ground crew tracking the Glamorous Glennis, which he named for his wife actually, every fighter he flew in World War II was so named heard "what sounded like a distant rumble of thunder: my sonic boom! The first one by an airplane ever heard on earth," Yeager said.

"When Yeager's achievement was finally declassified in June 1948, he was quickly accorded celebrity status as 'The Fastest Man Alive,'" the website said. He went on to fly the X-1 more than 40 times, achieving Mach 2.5.

Unfortunately, Yeager "couldn't even apply for the astronaut program because it required a university degree in science or engineering," Buzz Aldrin wrote in "Men From Earth" (Bantam/1989). He had only a high-school diploma. After the chimpanzee HAM flew aboard the Mercury capsule in 1961, Aldrin said Yeager quipped that before Alan Shepard could make his flight, the astronaut "would have to 'brush monkey (expletive deleted)' off his seat before climbing aboard."

In 1975, Yeager left the Air Force as brigadier general. On his 89th birthday, Texas journalist Bob Crowley summed up Yeager's service (quoted on chuckyeager.com): "He could have retired to the private sector in the 1950s, but didn't. Instead, he was sent to Europe and assigned to a squadron that would have made a one-way flight with nuclear bombs if war had broken out. Again, in the 1960s, when he could have retired and spent his time doing endorsements, serving on corporate boards and having a comfortable life, he didn't. He went to Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War to lead a group of attack-bombers. He flew more than 100 missions personally. Instead of choosing wealth and comfort, he chose to serve his country."Michael Shinabery is an education specialist and humanities scholar at the New Mexico Museum of Space History. Contact him at michael.shinabery@state.nm.us.

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